This year marks 400 years since the Bard’s demise. . . The University of Notre Dame and others have an overflowing feast of events on the menu through 2016.
You want theater? Check. Plus lectures, operas, films, symphonies, exhibits, conventions and even
Shakespeare selfie stations on campus at Notre Dame and at the Morris Performing Arts Center in downtown South Bend.
Several talks, films and live theater events are planned, beginning this month and continuing through the year. This year may mark 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, but it can also be looked at as 400 years since the start of his literary legacy, Shakespeare at Notre Dame executive director Scott Jackson says.
Coinciding with the display of a First Folio through Jan. 29 at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, scholars will host “Folio Friday” discussions every Friday in January in the Rare Book and Special Collections department, on the first floor of the library on campus. Topics vary — from “Mobile Shakespeare” to a discussion of Shakespeare’s genres to “Centuries of Shakespeare.” If crowds get large enough, they’ll move down the hall to the Carey Auditorium.
Notre Dame Shakespeare studies professor Peter Holland says the celebration over the First Folio’s presence at Notre Dame is wonderful, but it’s not all that’s planned.
“It’s not a moment, and then it’s gone,” he says. “It’s a whole year of celebration.”
Holland says Shakespeare is still celebrated, 400 years after his death, because his stories still resonate with culture today.
“Shakespeare is wonderful — it’s great drama that asks you to think about other people,” he says.
If something on the silver screen is more to your liking, the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center will feature “
Caesar Must Die,” an Italian retelling of “
Julius Caesar,” and the National Theatre Live’s broadcast of “
As You Like It.”
“
As You Like It” will also be performed in another format — an opera. Opera Notre Dame will present the story in late April in an original piece commissioned by the university, Shakespeare at Notre Dame audience development manager Aaron Nichols says. The piece was composed by British composer Roger Steptoe, with libretto by Lesley Fernandez-Armesto and direction by Leland Kimball, according to Noelle Gunn Elliott, spokeswoman for the music department.
The annual Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, now in its 17th season, will take on “
The Tempest” and “
Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” in the summer, as well.
It’s not just Notre Dame, either. Music inspired by Shakespeare’s “
Romeo and Juliet” will be performed by the South Bend Symphony Orchestra in April, too.
Though not open to the public, Notre Dame will also play host to two conferences back-to-back — first, the Jan. 25-27 conference for the Shakespeare in Prisons Network, an international gathering of folks who use Shakespeare to work with incarcerated populations, followed by the Jan. 27-30 conference of the Shakespeare Theater Association. Jackson says the overlap is intentional — he wants to see the two groups interact.
Jackson, who teaches acting and Shakespeare regularly at Westville Correctional Facility and who is also a member of STA, thinks the two groups can learn quite a bit from each other. He co-founded SPN with Holland and Curt Tofteland, who also founded the organization Shakespeare Behind Bars. Holland wants the two groups — folks running theaters and Shakespeare programs around the world, people working with prisoners daily — to meet and share ideas.
“This idea of having the two conferences together is part of what makes Notre Dame unique,” Jackson says. “There’s a social justice angle. We have a different approach to Shakespeare. Theater, and Shakespeare, is a catalyst for positive social change.” [feature article by Amanda Grey -- IN THE BEND arts magazine]
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